Google released Angular in 2009 and has been updating it continuously ever since. The programming language has become a go-to favorite for developing performant digital solutions. If you are looking to start working on AngularJS development services, this article will highlight everything good and bad about the same.
Tracing Angular’s History and Versions
Due to constant developments in the programming language, telling apart angular 2, 2+, AngularJS, Angular 9, etc., is difficult. So, before we jump to the pros and cons of AngularJS development, let’s clear the differences between its versions.
AngularJS
AngularJS came out in 2010, and it came with a bang in the development community. After its launch, there was an upheaval in demand of AngularJS development services because of the benefits it offered.
AngularJS streamlined the development of single-page applications and helped create dynamic pages. It allowed doing so with much less complexity compared to what developers used to do before AngularJS came into the picture.
Angular 2+
Angular 2+ is a completely new version of AngularJS. Angular 2+ was so different that the developers could not migrate from the older version to the new one. The amount of work required was extensive, complex, and vast.
Most important of all the developments, Angular 2+ is based on TypeScript as against AngularJS, which is based on JavaScript. Angular 2+ was later renamed as Angular to remove the confusion.
Interest in Angular as seen on Google Trends.
Angular 2 to 9
Right from Angular 2 to 9, the developer community saw a series of changes and upgrades that helped programmers build even better solutions. Angular 4, Google introduced Angular CLI 1.0.0, and it became a core aspect of the entire Angular ecosystem.
It also added Angular Universal, which led to the rendering of Angular applications outside of the browser. The majority of the updates in Angular 5 and 6 focussed on improving the CLI. Plus, there was some refinement of the compiler.
In these two versions, the Angular development team provided every AngularJS development company and individual with an upgrading tool to ease the migration. Angular 7 also focused on improving the CLI experience and provided the developers with Prompts.
These prompts provided tips and suggestions within the CLI for explaining the functions of added elements as well as their purpose. Ultimately, the Angular development team is moving towards making Angular CLI more intuitive and developer-friendly.
Read More : The Need of Progressive Web App & Comparison with A Native App
Angular 8 introduced two amazing updates to the Angular ecosystem. These are Ivy Renderer and Bazel. Ivy Renderer is the next-gen compilation and rendering mechanism. Quoting the Angular development team, the Ivy Renderer is going to be smaller, simpler, and faster.
Bazel helps in breaking down the application into distinct and independent build units. As a result, the Angular 8 progression gave the developers another way to create high-performance applications.
Ending this discussion with Angular 9, which was released in February 2020. It’s quite the same old story with improvements in the previous big additions and some tweaking of the Angular Material.
With these many improvements and additions, we still have developers providing AngularJS development services and businesses choosing the framework to build SPAs. Why is that?
Well, the next section will list out the pros of AngularJS Development Services.
Pros of AngularJS Development
Dependency Injection
AngularJS has dependency injection, which removes the need to change the components with every dependency in one component. With AngularJS development services, the injectors delink the predefined dependencies from their components. As a result, the components are more manageable, easier to test, and can be reused.
It has Two-Way Data Binding
Two-Way data binding has helped AngularJS achieve the distinction it has got till today. The purpose of adding this feature is that the changes in View are reflected in the Model and vice versa.
The ngModule handles the complex task of making these changes without requiring the developer to do it separately.
Easy to Use and Prototyping
With Angular, you can build a minimum viable application with the fastest startup time. From scratch to a full-fledged application, you can build a fully working digital solution.
Features like real-time testing and seeing changes instantly is highly advantageous. In addition to this, the CI/CD flow of AngularJS is quite amazing and developer-friendly.
Due to this, developers get fast code rendering, less number of asynchronous requests, and smaller code size.
While these are the major advantages of AngularJS, there are few things that the Angular community is not very proud of.
AngularJS Cons
It has Performance Issues
While building and running simple single-page applications is an advantage with AngularJS, building complex SPAs and digital solutions is not an advantage.
AngularJS has performance issues regarding high-end SPAs. in particular; you can expect some turbulence in large objects, server calls, long lists, updating ng-repeat, etc.
It’s not Easy to Learn
Another one of the issues with AngularJS is that it’s not easy to learn. Even though AngularJS is easy to use, learning it is a whole another story. The thing with its learning curve actually comes from its versatility.
As a comprehensive development technology, there are several ways to complete one task. As a result, confusion arises among the developers in terms of “which is the best way to complete this task.”
This can also become an issue when you want to hire AngularJS developers, as candidates may use a different method to complete the work as opposed to what you intended.
Lack of Information on CLI
We have discussed the CLI in the above sections. CLI is a beneficial and great thing for AngularJS development services, but the lack of documentation causes issues.
Conclusion
AngularJS has had an amazing journey till date. We can only expect the development team at Google to make it even better and more responsive. Working on AngularJS development services, any developer or organization will feel elated with the cons of the platform addressed and to see more advanced features in the future.
With features like Ahead of Time and TypeScript 3.7 already functional in the Angular environment, having such functionalities in AngularJS will be great for creating complex single-page applications without any issues.
Let’s see what the future developments of AngularJS will be like and how it will benefit the AngularJS development services companies plus individuals.